That sense of isolation has gained a new relevance and timeliness with the coronavirus lockdowns, but what is interesting about the world of the House is that it is both prison and paradise for the (seemingly) straightforward and self-reliant Piranesi. He feeds himself by fishing and foraging for seaweed and has devised a form of religion in which he honours the 13 dead This confinement seems to have provided one of the inspirations for the fantastical framework of Piranesi, where the eponymous hero finds himself exiled to a labyrinthine world, deprived of human contact apart from twice-weekly meetings with the Other. Clarke has written powerfully of the illness that kept her from writing during the intervening years, often confining her to bed in the home she shares with her husband. I read that superb debut when my wife was pregnant with our son now, as its successor is published, he is reading Jonathan Strange. Piranesi is a book of imagined worlds and unpredictable capitalisations, of mystery and murder and university life.įor those of us who had been eagerly awaiting a new Susanna Clarke after 2004’s wildly enjoyable Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell, it has been a fair old hiatus. Piranesi knows the patterns of the tides that move through the House, sweeping everything before them, pouring over the statues and ornaments, rushing up staircases and across the House’s marble Halls and Vestibules. Piranesi is around 30, the Other almost twice his age. Of these, Piranesi believes only himself and “the Other” are still alive. He knows also the number of those who have ever existed: 15. He knows the House intimately, every one of its 7,678 Halls.

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